Merchants of Babylon

Citation preview

Rev. Bertrand L. Comparet

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Upon reading these most interesting discussions one will quickly recognize that the author is an ardent student of the Bible and particularly escatology or the study of the prophecies of the things which have already taken place, the things that are now taking place, and the things that are yet to take place in the future. He is an ordained minister. His studies in this area of thought extend back over a period of thirty years. One will qu ickly appreciate also the straight forward manner of factual presentation and logical thinking. This is due to his professional training and and occupation as a well recognized Attorney at Law. He not only writes in a clear, convincing style, but is distinguished in the pulpit, on the lecture platform, and over the air for his clarity of thought and profound logic. Bertrand L. Comparet is a native Californian, born in San Diego. He was graduated from Stanford University. with the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctor. He was admitted to the California Supreme Court or California Bar in 1926 and by the United States Supreme Court in 1956. From 1926 t01932 he was a Deputy District Attorney in San Diego County and from 1942 to 1947 was Deputy City Attorney for the City of San Diego. Since that time he has been in private law practice. Quite obviously, he is a tried and true Christian and a loyal and patriotic American a believer in a Sovereign America under Constitutional government.

READ THE FOLLOWING BOOKS BY BERTRAND L. COMPARET Your Heritage - The Great Jubilee - I Come As A Thief Babylon's Money - Merchants Of Babylon - Book Of Esther The Lavvs Of God - Isaiah Up To Date - The Good And The Bad Figs Is It Enough Merely To Be An Israelite - By Divine Appointment The Cain Satanic Seedline - What Happened To Cain?

1 to 4 copies $1.25 - 5 to 9 copies $1. - 10 to 24 copies $0.85 each 25 or more copies $0.75 each. Complete Set of above books $10.00. Titles may be assorted for quantity discount prices! 666-Mark Of The Beast

1 to 4 copies $2. - 5 to 9 copies $1.75 - 10 to 24 copies $1.50 25 or more copies $1.25 each. Order from: YOUR HERITAGE P.O. Box 5486 San Diego, California 92105 or from: LIBERTY BELL PUBLICATIONS Reedy, West Virginia 25270

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON

by

Rev. Bertrand L. Comparet

This booklet contains the talk which Rev. Bertrand L. Comparet del ivered to a group attending one of his regular Bible studies in Manhattan Beach, California, the evening of September 17,1966.

ORDER FROM SONS OF LIBERTY P. O. BOX 214 METAIRIE, LA. 70004

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON

Last time we started in studying the matter of the beast and the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation, we saw that this curious beast with the characteristics of the four different animals was really a repetition of the series of beasts wh ich Dan iel had seen and which, like Nebuchadnezzar's image, were prophecies of four great gentile world empires which would rule the then known civilized world, one after the other. Now the Book of Revelation looks further into the future than Daniel did, because it points out something. Daniel's last beast, you remember, was the Roman empire which of course was finally broken up and came to its end. But the Book of Revelation carries beyond that point and shows us that the same forces wh ich were operative in these four successive empires, the same dominant satanic leadership which made them all of similar character, are operating even into our own day. And it shows us, by its many references through here, to what it calls Great Babylon, that the forces which made Babylon the outstanding one of these ancient civilizations about it, so far as a purely materialistic culture lacking all spiritual values is concerned, Babylon had it to a higher degree than any of the others. Nevertheless, because of this complete lack of any spiritual understanding, it was a satanic organization And long after the old city of Babylon had fallen, the same forces, the old Babylonian economic system which governs us absolutely today, the old Babylonian political ideas, the old Babylonian religion, are still operative even in these days. 1

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON Now, before we get on to the final part of our study of this, studying that mark of the beast which is going to be the final exercise of complete economic control and which we are beginning to feel tighten down on us even today, there is a Iittle bit of parenthesis we have to throw in here, to identify these forces. Our churches have gotten nowhere with this thing, usually because they persist in mis-identifying the peoples and races and forces involved, with the result that they get a mixed up mess. The Bible doesn't bother recording incidents which were of no importance after their own day. The Bible goes into those things which will be of lasting effect, because it was never intended that any portion of the Bible should be something good for a matter of a few years and then obsolete and no longer useful. As Paul said in I Corinthians 10, verse 11: "Now all these things happened to them for examples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the end of the age are come.' So the things you find in the Bible are the forces that are still operating. True, a particular king that it mentions doing this or that in the Bible is long since dead, but his modern day successors are still carrying out the same policies and still getting the same evil results thereby. Well, why all this trouble? Why these thousands of years of the complete dominance of evil? And the answer is that we are undergoing that same experience of good and evil for which Adam sold his birthright. Adam was not put here in the world to participate in evil, but only in good. God warned him that of the fruit of the tree wh ich has knowledge or experience of good or evil, "you shall not" - as your Bible is translated, "eat of it" - but it is more than that. You will find that the word translated "fruit" means progeny, children, descendants in the Hebrew: and the word translated I

2

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON there, "eat," means, in the Hebrew, to have intercourse with. Adam was told, "Now don't you get mixed up with these pre-Adamic races who have evil so ingrained in them that you are not going to be able to lift them out of it; they will make you like one of them. You are here to have good only, and not evil, in your character and your conduct." Then he let himself be persuaded by Satan that the way to have power in this world, and rule, you had to get down off your pedestal and mingle with these people and learn their ways and out-smart them, and you had to be more clever, more crooked than they were - until, what was the result? Satan, who had been the superintendent of this planet and probably some others, was deposed because he disobeyed God, he rebelled against God. Well , what did Adam do? He did the same thing. So Adam forfeited that position at rulership over the world which had been given to him. Now we are his descendants and we act the same way. When you see a sign on the wall, "Fresh Paint," you have to go up and touch it with your finger to see if it really is fresh. We have to learn everything the hard way, just as Adam did. So we are being given a period of testing to see what our own character is and to let us learn by bitter experience that the evil is not to be monkeyed with. When we come back in the resurrection and God says 'Now don't do this, ,. we are going to understand thoroughly what He is talking about and we are not going to think that we are smarter than He is. Probably more damage has been done by wellmeaning people with good intentions than has been done by all the scoundrels in history. The old saying that "hell is paved with good intentions," is very true. And you remember, twice in the Book of Proverbs 3

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON (Proverbs 14 verse 12, and 16 verse 25) it says the same thing. "There is a way that seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." So always some well meaning fool decides that he knows more about it than God and he is more kind. When our ancestors the people of Israel were on the march, were on the march and ready to go into Palestine, God gave us our instructions very plainly. He said of the people who were in the land He was telling them to take possession of, "You shall exterminate them totally; you shall not leave one man, woman, or child, alive; because, if you do, if you leave them there, you are going to have integration, your children will grow up with theirs, they will inter-marry with them, and you will become as polluted as they are, until finally I will have to exterminate you for the very same reason that I am tell ing you to exterminate them." And so of course our ancestors had to show that they weren't cruel like God. They were so kind hearted they wouldn't cut out the cancer; they just let it grow. And of course the consequences came to pass that they had been warned about, and that is the situation that we still have, and probably until the very end we are not going to be smart enough to recognize the warnings that are in the Bible. Evil cannot exist by itself; it is not a condition. You can't show me a yard of it or a square foot of it or a quart of it or a pound of it; it consists solely in the evil actions of evil people. And if they aren't around, then you don't have these evil actions. That is what we haven't been will ing to learn. So the Bible is full of these warnings to us, telling us who the evil ones are, so that we can avoid them and their works. The theme of the entire Bible is set forth in Genesis 3 verse 15. God has called Adam and Eve and Satan before Him, to give an accounting of their misdeeds,

4

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON and He says to Satan, "1 will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed... " Now the same Hebrew word "zera" (meaning literally "seed," and which applied equally to "descendants") is used in both cases. Satan was to have just as literal children as was Eve. So the theme of the Bible is stated there: that as long as God permits this dispensation to run, there would be this constant warfare between the children of Satan and the children of Eve, and the rest of the Bible is just a detailed development of that theme . You will find in John 8, verses 31 to 44, that Jesus Christ identified these living children of Satan in His Own day, when He said to them, "Ye are the children of your father the devil." He was not just being vulgarly abusive, He was telling them a plain biological fact, exactly the same as if you said to a Chinaman, Your ancestors were Mongolians. He told them with the strictest scientific truth that thei r ancestor, way, way back, was Satan - and He was right. He was always right. Whether you recognize Satan as an actual person, which the Bible does, or whether you try to explain him away as just a mere allegorical personification of evil tendencies, you still can't get away from the fact that evil comes from those who are his followers, and primarily those who are his literal children, his descendants; all history teaches that same lesson. One of the most important of the ancient cities was the city of Tyre. It was a Palestinian seaport, it was one of the great trading centers of the world. It lay on the Palestinian coast a little bit north of where the people of Israel were settled. Its inhabitants were a Semitic race but not Israel, although there were some Israelites living among them, as there were some Israelites scattered in various other cities. It was always friendly

5

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON

to Israel; the Bible never records any hostil ity, any warfare between Israel and Tyre. You remember its King Hiram sent to King Solomon much of the materials and some of the skilled workmen to build the temple that Solomon put up. But the Bible shows that Tyre came into this satanic system. The Bible speaks of one of the kings of Tyre, and it doesn't identify him, it doesn't give his name, we can't say which historical king it was, but it speaks of him in terms which show unmistakabley that he was literally an incarnation of Satan himself - because this language would not be applicable to anyone else. Here is what Ezekiel was told: "Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emeralds, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast waiked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou was created, till iniquity was found in thee ... Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will lay thee before kings, that they may oehold thee.' Now you couldn't apply that language to any mere man, it doesn't fit, he can't live up to it. So it shows that the satanic direction, there, was really carried on in person at one time. Now under this satanic direction Tyre became one of the great merchant cities of the ancient world, probably the greatest . I read to you just I

6

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON now from Ezekiel 28, verses 12 to 17. In Rotherham's Emphasized Bible, Ezekiel 27 verses 2 and 3 are rendered as follows: "Take up over Tyre a dirge; and thou shalt say unto Tyre, 0 thou that dwellest by the entrance of the sea, thou merchant of the peoples, unto many shores ... " It is worth noting, incidentally, that in the Hebrew the very same word, "Kenaan," meant a Canaanite and a merchant; they were interchangeable - as today they are. Go into the business district of Los Angeles, for example, and go in store after store, and see if you don't find them all owned by people of the same race and all with the same shaped nose. You don't have to go far into archeology to find the proof of who these Canaanites were. The Israelites were not Jews; no Israelite was ever a Jew, and no Jew was ever an Israel ite. The confusion has come from using the term interchangeably, sometimes meaning a person of a particular race, no matter what his religion. For example, Ben Gurion, who was the principal founder of this Jewish nation in Palestine today, is a Jew by race, but he is a Buddhist by religion. And sometimes they use it to speak of the people of Judaism, no matter what the race. There are, for example today, pure blooded, black skinned, kinky haired Negroes who have adopted the religion of Judaism; and there are yellow skinned, slant eyed, pure blooded Mongol ian Ch inese who have adopted the religion of Judaism, and the average person doesn't know which he is talking about when he uses the term "Jew." But to the extent that it is used in a racial significance, all the ancient monuments without exception show this: the people that we call Canaanites, the people that we call Assyrians, and a large part of the people that we call Babylonians, were, as shown by their own monuments, typical hook-nosed Jews; 7

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON whereas, no ancient monument that shows any Israelites shows anything but a typical straight-nosed Anglo-Saxon type of face. So trade was in those days practically a Jewish monopoly, as it is today, and in those days it became evil, as it is today. Greed running uncontrolled always runs to that sort of extreme. Again, going back to the twenty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel: 'With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: By thy great wisdom and by thy traffick, hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches ... By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned ... Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee." You have heard the saying, "the more it changes the more it is the same" - then they rode on a camel, today we smoke a camel, but, after all, take our great commercial cities - New York, Chicago, Los Angeles the outstanding great commercial cities have been taken over completely by the Jews; and they are the outstanding centers of criminal violence too, aren't they? You see, if these things merely happened occasionally for no particular reason, the Bible would never bother to record them. It records only those things which are matters of unchangeable principle, some of them good principle, some of them evil principle, but the things that we can rely upon to be operative according to their nature and therefore either for our good or for our harm, as the case may be. But these people who monopolized trade in those days were I

8

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON these Canaanites, these hook-nosed Jews. For example, Hosea 12 verse 7 as you read it in your King James Version, it says, "He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress." It says he is a "Kenaan" - sure, a merchant or Canaanite; the terms are interchangeable. "The balances of deceit are in his hand." Is there any people that for centuries it has been proverbial that you have to distrust in all your commercial dealings with them, lest they take advantage of you? Here it talks about the balances of deceit. Now in those days coinage was just coming into being and it was an uncertain thing. There was a certain amount of gold coinage, but lest somebody file off some of the gold so that the coin wasn't worth what it should be, the money was weighed out the same as the goods were weighed out. So the deceitful merchant had one set of weig hts to use on his balance scale when he was buying, he had a different set of weights to use when he was selling. When he bought from you, his balance scale or his bushel measure was large; you had to give him more than standard measure. When he sold to you, his measure was small and you didn't get your 'full measure. When you paid for something, for him the scales on which he weighed the money you presented had false weights, so you had to present more gold or silver, to buy it, than true weights would have called for - and this was characteristic all through there. Again, go to Zephaniah 1 verse 11: "Howl, ye inhabitants of Maktesh, for all the merchant people (the Kenaan) are cut down; all they that are laden with silver are cut off." This race was everywhere throughout western Asia. Some of you will remember that, back when I showed you some of my slides, I showed you pictures of a little ancient pre-Babylonian Sumarian statue of one of their

9

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON own people, a typical hook-nosed Jew even rubbing his hands and undoubtedly saying, "To mine own mother I couldn't sell it any cheaper. I showed you pictures of the beautiful glazed and painted tile from the lining of an Assyrian palace where their best artists showed their own people, the Assyrians, as typical hook-nosed Jews. I showed you pictures of sculpture from the walls of a Hittite palace where they showed their own people as typical hook-nosed Jews. It was into this land, among these people, that our ancestors were sent to Iive, and they were warned, III f you allow these people among you, they are going to corrupt you." Of course we couldn't be cruel like this Old Testament God, that our ministers like to denounce today and say "I can't believe in the Old Testament God." You know they seem to think that it would matter to Him whether they believed in Him or not. But let me tell you, every time you decide you are better than God, you are wrong! When He gave instructions to cut out the cancer before it became fatal, He knew what He was doing. The Bible tells us of these things. God tells us the troubles we are going to have because we allow these people among us. And He finally tells us that when we ourselves have botched this thing up to the point where He has to come back and take over personally, to keep us from being destroyed and exterminated by these forces we have allowed to grow up and take control, that it is going to be changed back to what He told us to make it. In Zechariah 14 verse 21 it says" ... and in that day (speaking of the day when God comes back to restore these things) - " ... in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts." And heaven speed the day! Well, these same commercial evils became dominant in Assyria too. Now Assyria is spoken of, mostly, II

10

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON because of her great military exploits, because she was constantly conquering and pillaging her various neighbors. But that was not all of it. She had the same typical crookedness that has been consistently characteristic of those people. In Nahum 3 verse 16, speaking of Assyria, it says, "Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven ... " - and he lists that as being among the evils for which the city of Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, was going to be destroyed. In Bible times these people had become the completely dominant race in the city of Tyre, become the most powerful men in the nation. Isaiah 23 verse 8: "Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth?" If you think that was ancient, note the fact that a large part of the British nobility today, the peerage with titles of nobil ity, are Jew merchants who became wealthy and bought and paid for their titles of nobility. The honor of the British Crown has been sold and peddled like in any house of ill fame, and that is the origin of a great many of the titles in your British House of Lords. Over here, when we want to appoint an ambassador to some foreign nation, who is he? Don't you note that usually he is a Jew who has contributed liberally to the campaign funds of the party which is in power. "The more it changes the more it is the same. " God wouldn't have bothered telling us about this tning, to warn us, if this was something that was going only between 868 and 742 B.C., and not thereafter; it wouldn't have meant anything. He warns us of these things because they are reaching a degree of intensity in our own day which means the literal destruction of civilization if they are not checked. Now you 'find of course in your Bible many places where God condemned the city of Babylon for the evils which were 11

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON so characteristic of the Babylonian civilization. But it is very interesting to note that when the Bible prophesies the fall of the city of Tyre, it does it in the very same words that it uses in prophesying the fall of Babylon, including the final fall of Great Babylon, the Babylonian system in our own day. For example, note this, speaking of the city of Tyre (this is Ezekiel 26 verse 13): "And I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be heard no more." Now speaking of Great Babylon (and this is Revelation 18 verse 22): And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in the ... " Now going back to Tyre (Ezekiel 26 verse 21): III will make thee a terror, and thou shalt be no more: though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith the Lord God. " Now Great Babylon, the destruction of it in our own day (Revelation 18 verse 21): And a mighty angel took up a stone Iike a grea1 millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down and shall be found no more at all." Now the city of Tyre again: Note this parallel all the way, it is talking about the same thing; in other words, just as you had in the Babylonian empire the capital city Babylon which was the head of all these evils, but you had a number of other surrounding cities which were equally bad and the same things could be said of them So you had identically the same people manifesting the same evils in Tyre on the Palestinean coast of the Mediterranean Sea and which had to meet the same judgment. Here is Ezekiel 27, verses 29 to 33: And all that handle the oar, the mariners, and all the pilots of the sea, shall come down from their ships, they shall stand upon the land; ... and shall cry bitterly, and shall cast up II

II

I I

12

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON dust upon their heads, they shall wallow themselves in the ashes... And in their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and lament over thee, saying, What city is like Tyre, the destroyed in the midst of the sea? When thy wares went forth out of thee, and thou didst fill many people; thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy merchandise. In the time when thou shalt be broken by the seas in the depths of the waters thy merchandise and all thy company in the midst of thee shall fall." Now note the same language referring to Great Babylon in the Book of Revelation. And remember, Babylon was not a seaport, it was some few hundred miles inland. "And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads , and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate." That is Revelation 18, verses 17 to 19. Now, if these people were the same throughout, we should expect to find something similar in God's condemnation of another of their principal settlements, the land of Edom. The Bible tells you, you know , that certain of the angels left their original condition and intermarried with the daughters of men and produced a race which therefore had the satanic blood line. They were literally the children of these rebel angels, including Satan, and among the places where the Bible tells you their descendants settled was Mount Seir. You remember, the Jordan valley runs north and south. It is a deep narrow trench in the ground with mountains to the west, between it and the sea, and another mountain range to the east, and it slopes down

13

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON to the point of the Dead Sea where the surface of the Dead Sea is some 1,300 feet below sea level, and the bottom of the Dead Sea is another 1,200 feet below that. So the ground surface down there, under the Dead Sea, is 2,500 feet below sea level, of the Mediterranean or the oceans of the world. Then a continuation of that same valley, called the Wadi Araba, extends on south to the Gulf of Aquba. Of course, starting from way down, way below sea level, the bottom of it has to rise as it goes southward. till it gets above sea level, and the mountains which bound this Wadi Araba, on the east are known as Mount Seir. Now that word "Seir" means "rugged," and if you have ever seen really rugged mountains, that is what they are; they are well named. Most of you have heard of the ancient city of Petra Some time, way in the far pre-historic past, a terrific earthquake took this Mount Seir and just cracked it open. There is a valley running north-south; that is, right down the center line of this mountain range. And what the earthquake did was to open a great crack 'from the easterly side of these mountains, whereby, instead of climbing up and over the mountains, you go through this great crack tell you get to that central valley. The walls of this great crack are sheer cliffs from 400 to 600 feet high. In places a man could stand there and put his arms out and touch both sides of it. In other places it widens out as wide as this room. There never has been any place in the world as great a natural fortress as that, because there are places where, if an army of a million men attacked it, they would have to come through one or two at a time through this natural crevice . So it has been a fortified place, a city. from time immemorial. Where this crack goes in, like the stem of a "T," it reaches this other valley which crosses it like the 14

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON cross-bar of a capital' 'T" - and if you turn to your right, to the north, you follow it down where it opens out into an oval valley perhaps a mile wide by a mile and three-quarters long. Now in this narrow passageway, from the point where the stem and the cross-bar of the "T" join, from there on in, you find the ancient city of Petra. Practically none of its bUildings were buildings such as we have today, built out in the open: they were carved into these sheer cliff walls; magnificent, beautifully carved. Of course they could be only one room deep, other than for storage closets, because there was no rear or side light or ventilation. They were just, you might say, artificial caves in the solid stone, and the outside was carved into the most magnificent structures, with one startling thing about them: they are two stories in height, and those two stories range from a minimum of 125 feet to a high of 140 feet. You may recall that the old height-limit 13-story buildings in the city of Los Angeles were 140 feet in height. So divide one of those 13-story buildings into just two stories, and you see what they were like in Petra. In other words, the first generation descendants of these fallen angels were indeed giants. The average doorway in Petra, from the floor to the lintel across the top, is 30 feet in height, equal to three stories of our modern construction. Now the Bible, you remember, was always so insistent that the people God had selected to be His people should not mongrelize, should not intermix with the other races; and you remember that Esau violated that command, he married two Canaanite women and later an Ishmaelite woman. He couldn't stay there then. His descendants mongrelized, had no right to inherit, so he moved out of the land of Canaan where his brother Jacob was to stay. Esau moved out into Mount Seir which is called the 15

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON land of Edom. Now, from then on, there was no one for his descendants to marry except these Edomite peoples who were the descendants of this satanic line of people living there . Suppose, for example, that a White man from the city of Ontario married two Negresses and then moved to the interior of the Congo, and for the next 1,800 years his descendants lived there, and there was no one his descendants could marry except these Congolese Negroes. Now after the end of 1,800 years, one of his descendants couId say, "Once I had a Wh ite ancestor. " That is very true, but the last trace of White blood would have vanished from them; they would be in every respect plain Negroes. You remember, in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John where Jesus Christ is speaking to the Jews (and it says" Jews"), there is no mistake about it. And by the way, if any of you think He was merely being vulgarly abusive because they disagreed with Him in argument, well don't; He never was. He denounced them as hypocrites at times because that is what they were; and He told them with biological accuracy that they were the descendants of Satan which they were. But He never sa.id anything abou.t them, that they were not. So you can hear the ring of sarcasm in His voice. It mentions, now, that these were Jews who believed in Him. So He says to them, "If you can continue in my doctrines, then will you be my disciples indeed; and you shall know the truth, and the truth wi II set you free" and as I say, you can just hear the ring of sarcasm in His voice, because He knew them. With that one statement Christ had lost them. They bristled up, "What do you mean, set us free? We are Abraham's seed, and we have never been in bondage to any man." Now they identified themselves, there, out of their own mouths. If they belonged to any

16

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON of the 12 tribes at all, they had been in bondage the first time in Egypt, hadn't they? And if they belonged to the 10-tribed northerly nation of Israel, they had been in bondage the second time in Assyria. And if they belonged to the 2-tribed southerly nation of Judah, they had been in bondage the second time, in Babylon. But they said, "We have never' been in bondage to any man ." Then Christ said, "That is right; you are in bondage to sin however." Now the only people who could say , 'Abraham was an ancestor of ours and we never were in bondage to anyone" were these Edomite Jews . There is where the satanic blood line had crept into them, because, from the days of Abraham, it continued down through Isaac, then to Esau; and there you started the pollution with mongrelization, picking up the satanic blood line. So Christ winds up that same passage in the eighth chapter of John by identifying them, telling them who their ancestor was: Satan! Now these mongrelized descendants of Esau became quite a military power as they grew numerous down there in Edam. You read in the Bible, in the historical books of Chronicles and Kings, of considerable warfare at times, of the Edomites harassing the southerly borders of Judah and the Israelite tribes. Saul was told to go down there and exterminate them, and he didn't. He killed a few of them, he stole their sheep and cattle and came back, and for that God told the prophet Samuel to tell him, "I have deposed you as king and I am going to make a better man than yourself the king of this nation Israel." When the southerly kingdom of Judah was taken into captivity for 70 years by Babylon, deported into Babylon, you remember that nearly all the people were taken, all the real tribes of Judah and Benjamin were deported. Those Canaanites who had been left in the

11

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON land when the Israelites conquered and failed to exterminate them, the Babylonians left behind, and they were but a very few, relatively speaking. So during the 70 years that the land was left partly vacant, the Edomites were displaced from their position in Mount Seir by a great invasion by an Arabian people, the Nabateans, and the Edomites were finally driven out westwardly. Now they couldn't go southwest, much, because they would be getting into the borders of Egypt, and Egypt was much too big and powerful for them to tackle at that time. So they kept north of the borders of Egypt and they took over the southerly half, approximately, of what had been the old kingdom of Judah, the 2-tribed nation of Judah. When this little handful of people came back, after the Babylonian captivity, 42,600 people (of whom slightly over 8,000 were not of any of the tribes of Israel at all, as the books of Ezra and Nehemiah show you), there were 34,000 people who could trace their ancestry to Judah, Benjamin, or Levi; that's all. They were not numerous enough to displace these Edomite invaders, so all they could do was move to the north. Now, originally, the tribe of Judah was to the south, the tribe of Benjamin to the north, and the capital city of Jerusalem lay right on the border line between them, Then north of Benjamin was the old 10-tribed kingdom of Israel. You remember, the Bible records that when the kingdom of Israel was taken into captivity by Assyria, the Assyrians brought other people from near Assyria and settled them in Samaria. Now if you take the territory occupied by the original 12 tribes, the southerly third made up the 2-tribed kingdom of Judah, the middle third was the southerly half of the northern kingdom of Israel (and this middle half became Samaria) and the northerly third of this total territory

18

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON came to be known as Galilee. The Bible says the Assyrians brought other people and settled them in Samaria (and left Galilee vacant). So when the people returning from Babylon tried to sort themselves out, the people of Judah took the southerly part, and all they had left, really, was a portion of the old territory of Judah plus all the territory of Benjamin, and they pushed the Benjamites northward. But Benjarnin couldn't just move over a Iittle, because that was Samaria and fully occupied by other people. So the people of Benjamin had to leap-frog over, clear into the vacant territory of Galilee, and that is where the Benjamites settled. Of course you remember that nearly all the followers of Christ came from Galilee. Of all His 12 disciples, 11 of them were Galileans; only one, Judas Iscariot, was a Jew. There is no such word in any language known to man as Iscariot" - it is a garbling, in trying to transliterate into Greek, of the Hebrew word "ish Kerioth," man of Kerioth. And Kerioth is a little village in the southwesterly portion of the old territory of the kingdom of Judah, well within the area taken over by these Edomite Jews. Then these Edomite Jews, under Herod, conquered and took over the remainder of the territory of the kingdom of Judah, and Herod was confirmed by the Romans in 37 B.C. as king of Judea . So he brought in with him his army, he brought in with him all his hangers-on, he completely took over the civil government, and he took over the temple. The Levites and Aaronic priesthood were displaced. He murdered the last high priest, the man rightfully entitled to it as a descendant of Aaron. He put into the high priesthood a succession of worthless scoundrels of his own followers. You see, the high priesthood was hereditary and for life, and you remember your Bible, speaking of one of

19

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON these high priests, sarcastically comments: "He was high priest that year." In fact, one of them served something like four and one-half months, I believe, before he was removed from office and replaced by a lower type scoundrel than himself. Now here were these Edomite Jews who were the same hook-nosed Canaanite people with the satanic blood line which Christ identified in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John. Now if this is, as I say, the same thread running through all of these things, Babylon is one manifestation of it, Assyria is another manifestation of it, Tyre is another manifestation of it, and we should find something said about Edom. shouldn't we? We do. Let us note the parallel, now, between God's judgment on Edom and His judgment on Babylon. In the forty-ninth chapter of Jeremiah He is telling you about His judgment on Edom, in the fiftieth chapter He is telling you of His judgment on Babylon. So Jeremiah 49, verses 18 and 19, says: "As in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbour cities thereof, saith the Lord, no man shall abide there, neither shall a son of man dwell in it. Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan against the habitation of the strong: but I will suddenly make him run away from her: and who is a chosen man, that I may appoint over her? for who is like me? and who will appoint me the time? and who is that shepherd that will stand before me?" Now there He is speaking of Edom. Now go on to the next chapter where He is speaking of Babylon: "As God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbour cities thereof, saith the Lord; so shall no man abide there, neither shal I any son of man dwel I therein. Behold, a people shall come from the north, and a great nation, and many kings shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth ... The king of Babylon hath

20

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON heard the report of them, and his hands waxed feeble: anguish took hold of him, and pangs as of a woman in travail. Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan unto the habitation of the strong: but I will make them suddenly run away from her: and who is a chosen man, that I may appoint over her? for who is like me? and who will appoint me the time? and who is that shepherd that will stand before me?" Now go back to Edom again , this judgment: "Therefore hear the counsel of the Lord, that he hath taken aga.inst Edom; and his purposes, that he hath purposed against the inhabitants of Teman: Surely the least of the flock shall draw them out: surely he will make their habitations desolate with them. The earth is moved at the noise of their fall, at the cry the noise thereof was heard in the Red sea." Now, going to chapter 50, speaking of Babylon, beginning with verse 45: "Therefore hear ye the counsel of the Lord, that he hath taken against Babylon; and his purposes, that he hath purposed against the land of the Chaldeans: Surely the least of the flock shall draw them out: surely he shall make their habitation desolate with them. At the noise of the taking of Babylon the earth is moved, and the cry is heard among the nations. " So this is talking now about the same thing in every instance: the fina.l destruction of this evil system which, through the same people, manifested itself in the same way, over all of western Asia in the ancient world, and which manifests itself in the same way over all of western civilization in our own day, and which can only be destroyed by the power of God, because we have abdicated the power that God gave us. We have put this thing in positions of power over us, in the last days before the final destruction of the Babylonian system which God prophesies in the Book of Revelation In

21

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON other words, it is talking about the same thing all the way through. Now notice again, the principal blame is placed upon these "Kenaan," these Canaanite Jew merchants, for the evils of Babylon. Here in the Book of Revelation, chapter 18, it says: "And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen ... " Note that repetition - not just the one fall of the ancient city. Sure, that has been nothing but a heap of mud out there in the desert for 2,000 years, but it refers to the second fall also. "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird . For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed forn ication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies ..." God never condemned any man for becoming well-to-do, out of any kind of honest effort; in other words, wealth gained honestly is never condemned anywhere in the Bible. And when He is condemning these rich merchants, it is because of the way they got their wealth, the way that, through all these centuries, has been so characteristic of them, that you won't find a race or a nation anywhere in the western world that doesn't have the same axioms and sayings about anybody who is fool enough to deal with a Jew. As they say, "When you deal with a Jew you are just payi ng your fool's tax." ., ... And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath re-

22

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON membered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she has filled fill to her double. " Remember your Israel law as given by God. What was the penalty for theft? Not a $25.00 fine, suspended. The penalty was, you gave back a minimum of at least twice the value of what you stole. If you stole $100.00, you had to give back $200.00 - and that took all the fun out of it; it wasn't profitable any more. So here is the law of God: For the way the Babylonian system and its people have become wealthy by cheating you, give to them double punishment. Now it goes on speaking of this last fall of great Babylon: "And the merchants (note this now) " ...the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more. ,. Now let us see if we can identify these merchants. "The merchandise of gold and silver. and precious stones, and of pearls ... " Who are your jewelers today? Do you know any Irish jewelers? " ...and fine linen, and purple, and silk. and scarlet. .. " What about the clothing manufacturer? Yes, once in a while you find a little retail store where you can go buy a shirt, or something of that sort, that is not run by them. But who are the manufacturers from whom he has to buy his stock-in-trade? Hart Schaffner and Marx? " ... and al/ aromatic wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble .. . " Your big department stores: all right, who owns them? You know the answer just as well as I do. " .. .And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense ... " What about the drug business? Find me just one big drug manufacturing firm, today. that is

23

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON not Jewish owned and Jewish controlled. Your big drug chains, all of them, like Thrifty Drug, ... No, I will take that back, there is one other, Sav-On Drugs, that is a Mormon institution controlled by the Zion Mercantile Company, and that is the only big drug chain that I have ever heard of that is operated by Wh ite men. wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beast and sheep .. ." All right, what about the wholesale food stores? Yes, you can find a little corner grocery store some place, run by White people, but find who it is that owns the big wholesale stores that he has to buy from. Yes, they have their strangle hold on that also, and that is why the prices continue to rise and rise. " ...and slaves, and souls of men." So these are the merchants. " ... The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing." Now you notice, early in this thing He says, " ... the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buys their merchandise any more." You know, we are beginning to get pretty close to that, because they are not leaving us anything to buy with. You talk to any economist today, who has kept up with what is going on, and he will tell you that we are being set up just exactly as we were in 1929, for just the same kind of a crash we had in 1929, only on a much bigger scale. Now, first they stole all of our gold. If you are a White man you can't have any. If you are a Jew banker you can have it in unlimited quantity, and especially you can get it from the U.S. Treasury if you are going to send it abroad, over to Palestine or over to one of these Swiss banks where it can't be traced any further. Now they have taken our silver from us. These slugs that' 'uncle" is minting now, with a copper-nickel alloy 1\ • • •

24

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON on the face of it to make it look like a quarter, actually it is worth less intrinsically, for the metal in it, than the five-cent piece which at least is copper-nickel alloy all the way through . So what we now have are things that are slugs of substantially no intrinsic value. Our paper money they have also made of no intrinsic value. What kind of paper money can you get today? Look at it, any denomination you may have, it is a Federal Reserve Bank note. Now when you go to the bank and borrow money, you sign a promissory note promising to pay to them, on a certain date, so much money. But the Federal Reserve note is an 1.0.U. from a purely private banking institution, in spite of the false use of that "federal" name. Yes, you can buy Federal tires but the U.S. Government has no part in the manufacture of them. You can buy Federal cartridges and it is a privately owned manufacturing company. And the Federal Reserve Bank is a private banking institution. So the only money left now is their 1.0.U., and they can tell you at any time, "Well, I'm sorry, we don't have any real money to redeem this with ." Right now, you take one of their Federal Reserve notes to any bank or to a Federal Reserve reg ional banking headquarters itself, and what can you get for it? You can't get anything for it except another 1.0.U even from the Federal Reserve Bank. And any time they laugh open Iy in your face and say, "Well, it is a pretty piece of engraved paper, it cost us 30 cents per $1,000.00 to get the printing done on it," what are you going to do with it? What is it worth? What is going to happen? You are dead broke. They have a mortgage on about everything you own. How many of you own your home, free and clear, without a mortgage or trust deed on it? And how many of you have your automobile fully paid for? I remember once seeing an old battered up jalopy on the street, but

25

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON the owner had chalked on the side of it, "Laugh if you want to, but this one is paid for.' Anytime, they can say, "Well, what are you going to use for money?" Everything you think you own, they own, and they can take it away from you. They did a pretty good job of that, back in 1929, but not quite good enough to totally destroy this nation. So they have studied it and seen where the weak spots of their plan were, and they have corrected those this time. But you know, evil has a way of outsmarting itself. One day they will laugh in your face and say, "All right, what is that paper good for? Are you going to buy something from the May Company? What are you going to pay for It with?' " ...The merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn ... for no man buys their merchandise any more." They got so clever in taking all your money away from you, that now you haven't anything to buy with. And when it reaches that point, the American people are not going to sit down and quietly watch their wives and children starve to death. They aren't going to buy the merchandise, but they are going to have whatever it takes. And there is where this people who, through the centuries have profited by their crookedness and their scheming, are going to find they have outsmarted themselves. They have made their tricks so clever that it has backfired on them. Now do you want a little further confirmation of this? Remember now, if you are wondering why I am talking about this, when a month ago I was talking about this strange beast that rose up out of the sea, the beast that had the combined characteristics of all four of the strange beasts that Daniel saw, remember, all of those ancient empires were governed by this same satanic people with their same satanic principles, and they are still here doing business at the old stand and in the same way. I

I

26

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON If you want a little more identification, let us go right on down in this same eighteenth chapter of Revelation: .. And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence ... " Remember what I said: the American people are not going to starve when they spring the trap on us. "Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all " Now this is not ta.lking about the fall of the ancient city Babylon on the Euphrates river, because all that had happened many centuries before John was told to write these things down. This was talking about the far distant future, 1,900 years after John was writing this down, talking about our own day, and it is still talking about that great city Babylon; in other words, the Babylon ian system. And it goes on to give the reasons " '" for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nat ions deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth." Now I know it is fash ionable inmost Protestant circles to try to blame everything upon the Catholic Church, and it is very true that the Catholic Church has a number of false doctrines, and it is very true that the Catholic Church in past centuries has murdered a great many innocent people; that is very true. But if you are going to blame Noah's flood on the Catholic Church , just in order to show that you don't like it, you are not using true Bible interpretation, because, remember that the Catholic Church didn't come into existence until a good three centuries after John wrote this thing. And all the innocent blood shed in the earth, and the prophets of the Old Testament, were they all murdered by the Catholic Church? Of course not. They had been dead many, many centuries before there was a Catholic

27

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON Church, " ... and of all that were slain upon the earth ... " The Catholic Church has been corrupted by these same people and used as a part of their same scheme, exactly as in our own day they have corrupted the Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, and some of the other Protestant churches, in the same manner, and it is all merely a portion of the same plan. Now let us see if we can trace this same thing. " ... in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of al\ that were slain upon the earth." Let us take the words of Jesus Christ Himself, out of the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, verses 29 to 36: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!. .. " Who was He talking to? He was talking to Jews, wasn't He? " ... because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets ... " Who? Jews. " ... Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers ... " And here you get into some of the miserable mistranslation of your King James version of the Bible. " ... Ye serpents, ye generation of vi pers ... " it reads, and that is entirely a mistranslation. In the original Greek from which this was translated, it is not talking about a particular generation of people; the Greek word is "gennema" which means progeny, children, descendants. " ... Ye serpents, ye children of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues ... " Any question about the identification there? " ... and persecute from city to city: That upon you ... "

28

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON The same race that He is talking to now, this same "gennema," children of vipers: " ... That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias ... whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily, I say unto you, All these things shall come upon th is generation ... " And agai n you have mistranslation, because here the word is "genea," derived from genos, which is the foundation of this word the Jew would like to coin, "genocide" - it means a race or nation. " ... AII these things shall come upon this race or nation." So this can only be the Jews who are referred to also, in Revelation 18 verse 24. All of this thing cannot be the Catholic Church is plain. The Catholic Church is not a mercantile organization running stores, it doesn't have a merchant navy of ships transporting goods. But the people who have had this commercial, financial power, all through all these centuries, are the same ones the Bible is talking about from beginning to end. So the fall of this evil satanic conspiracy must come with violence as it says in Revelation 18 verse 21. Now by whom are they brought down with violence? The Bible raises no questions that it does not answer, and the correct answer to it will always be found only in the Bible. So you turn to the twenty-fifth chapter of Ezekiel, verses 13 and 14. Remember now, one of their ancient headquarters from which the entirety of their control in our Savior's time came, was Edam. Ezekiel 25: 13-14: "Therefore th us saith the Lord God; I wi II also stretch out mine hand upon Edam, and will cut off man and beast from it; and I wit! make it desolate from Ternan; and they of Dedan shall faU by the sword. And' will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and they shall do in Edam according to rnine anger and according to my fury ... "

29

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON Now that has never happened in all past history. That is not talking about something that has happened before; that is something which is yet to come; and we know of course, and have proved many times over, that the so-called Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian peoples of today are the actual, literal, traceable, blood descendants of the Israel of the Bible. And God said, "By My people Israel, I will lay My vengeance upon Edom." And in the Book of Revelation, Jesus Christ told John, "This evil Babylonian system will be overthrown with violence." Remember what I said: the American people are not going to sit down and starve to death, quietly, when the trap is sprung on them. Turn to the one hundred forty-ninth Psalm, verses 5 to 9: "Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds... " Now who are the saints? Is it somebody who has been canonized by the Catholic Church for some such deed of piety as St. Simeon Stylites who spent some 20 years flagpole sitting up on top of a pillar, never once coming down to take a bath? No. You find in Psalm 148, verse 14, the statement of who all of God's saints are, not some of them, not part of them, but all of them: "He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of all his saints; even of the children of Israel, a people near unto him. Praise ye the Lord." Amen, say I. And the one hundred forty-ninth Psalm, the next one after that says, "Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand; To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people; To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; To execute upon them the judgment written: this honour have all his saints."

30

MERCHANTS OF BABYLON Because the Book of Revelation is symbolic throughout, and the only way you can get the true meaning of it is by finding the true meaning of the symbols used. A lot of people have gotten all mixed up and they have given you some surprisingly stupid attempts to unravel the Book of Revelation, because they will not turn to the one and only place from which you can derive a correct statement of what the symbols mean, and that is the Bible. They will theorize something which will fit the doctrines of the Methodist Church, for example, and they will never look it up in the Bible to see whether it is correct. But they will all agree that we have gotten so far along in the events that are symbolically portrayed in the Book of Revelation that nothing remains to be done, now, except this great final judgment which is the cataclysmic end of this age, and this is exactly what this has been talking about. It identifies the things and the peoples to be judged , it tells how the judgment is coming and who is going to do it. And if you are going to have the honor to be the servants of God in carrying out some of this judgment, you shouldn't go around sniffling and saying, "Isn't it awful." You should thank God that He would honor you with that privilege.

31

ORDER FROM SONS OF LIBERTY

P. O. BOX 214, METAIRIE, LA. 70004 YOUR HERITAGE P.O. Box 5486 San Diego, California 92105

or from: LIBERTY BELL PUBLICATIONS Reedy, West Virginia 25270